Expertise: The Knowledge of Things Unseen

I've written before about the value and importance of expertise. We used to believe, especially in the realm of science, that experts really did know more than the rest of us. Now, in a world of echo-chamber social media and fake news and "alternative facts", a lot of us (meaning here Americans) have chucked this notion out the window. Many of us now believe that we and our friends know the real truth, and that everybody else is either a dupe or a liar.

One reason why it's easy to fall into this trap is that we feel good about our echo chambers - they make us feel powerful and affirmed, a sort of antidote to the fear we've been taught is the proper response to the modern world. That part of the psychology that leads people to reject expertise and accept otherwise wacky ideas is pretty clear.

But there's another aspect to expertise that actually contributes to its widespread rejection. The nature of expertise is that people who are experts see things that non-experts can't see. They perceive things in the universe that are, quite literally, invisible to the rest of us.

This phenomenon has been well-documented in all sorts of arenas. Elite athletes, for example, have been studied extensively. It turns out that, while they tend to be in excellent health and have certain physical gifts, they're not especially more physically gifted in general than the rest of us. It's that the tens of thousands of hours of practice they put in have rewired their brains so they can perceive things other's can't. That's why the best hitters in professional baseball actually stand a good chance of hitting a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher, traveling at more than 95 miles per hour. He can see things about that ball that are invisible to the rest of us.

The same is true in medicine. An experienced doctor will see in a list of symptoms, or the way a patient answers a question, possible diagnoses that we know nothing about. Nor can we understand the connections between those little bits of information and the much larger issue. Doctors carry around a whole world of knowledge in their heads that is inaccessible to non-experts.

So it goes for nearly every field of human endeavor. Architects see things in buildings that the rest of us miss. Musicians hear things in music we can't hear. Engineers, lawyers, designers, auto mechanics - in almost any human endeavor involving expertise, experts are privy to a world out of reach of the rest of us.

Unfortunately, this makes it easy to dismiss expertise. It's easy to assume that everything you see is everything there is to see. We're pretty good at accounting for the data coming into our senses, but generally terrible about accounting for what's not there. Arthur Conan Doyle immortalized this in his story "Silver Blaze", in which Sherlock Holmes solves the otherwise unsolvable case by observing that a dog didn't bark.

I encounter this all the time in my own area of expertise - politics - because, as John Stewart Mill put it over 100 years ago, politics "is a subject which no one, however ignorant, thinks himself incompetent to discuss". In the political realm, we all think that we can see everything there is to see. And when "experts" come along and try to point out what we can't see, we often dismiss them because, well, we can't see what they're pointing at. We think they're just making it up.

There are two conclusions here. First, humility is not only a moral virtue, it's an intellectual necessity. We all need to know what we don't know (the height of Aristotle's wisdom). Second, we need to make an effort to determine where real expertise lies - not in who shouts the loudest or in who says things we want to believe, but in who has really put in the time and effort to establish a track record. Anybody can claim they're an expert - evaluate those claims carefully, especially when the supposed expert is simply confirming your own biases.

Expertise Matters

Like most of us, I get a fair bit of nonsense that floats by my feed on Facebook. This is actually the byproduct of a deliberate strategy of keeping a diverse group of FB friends and connections. I don't want to fall into the "echo chamber" trap, and I find it interesting to see what people who think very differently from me are thinking and sharing among each other.

Sometimes, though, I run across something so ridiculously silly I just can't ignore it. Today is one of those days:

Now, I get that there are people out there convinced that everything that pharmaceutical companies do is evil. Pharmas like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have unfortunately done enough bad things that, if you cherry-pick your evidence, it's not hard to justify this viewpoint (I don't say it's right, but I can see where you could get the evidence for it).

But the response to this belief is for folks to go out and "do their own research". Do they first bother to go out and obtain degrees in biomedical sciences so they can do that research? Of course not! Because anybody can read peer-reviewed scientific research in obscure journals and understand it, right?

I'm not surprised, but it does still amaze me that people can manage to tie their minds up into this particular pretzel. Even allowing for the different meanings of the term "research", this is an absurd proposition. If by "research" we mean here going directly "to the source" and reading the results that non-biased, non-industry scientists produce in their labs, the notion that anybody with less than a graduate education in the relevant field can do this is laughable. I have as much chance of getting into this summer's olympics as the average suburbanite with a college degree in communications has of understanding the real meaning of an article published in the International Journal of Toxicology, much less in understanding the broader scope of literature in which that article is situated.

This, of course, is one of the factors that allows for communities of people to band together and believe absurd things. The echo chamber that is Facebook facilitates this, but long before Mark Zuckerberg some folks figured out that you can ignore the rest of the world and believe whatever you want about it, so long as you discard the idea of expertise. In order to uphold this notion, you have to believe - even if you don't articulate - that education, practice, and experience don't really matter, and that anybody can master anything with just a little bit of effort. I mean, how hard can biochemistry be really?

The problem, of course, is that the world doesn't care what we think. As Richard Feynman famously wrote in the last sentence of his report on the Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

So folks are welcome to think that drug companies are evil (and somehow, amazingly disciplined - you'd think that more of the thousands of employees would leak the plans of their evil mastermind overlords). They're welcome to think that research that reaches conclusions they don't like isn't true, and that junk science and psychobabble that confirms their beliefs is real. What none of this will change is the reality underlying the science. Bacteria, genetic mutation, climate change - all of these things will happen whether we understand them or not, and whether we like them or not.

So if you find yourself patting your friends on the back for doing their "own research" that fits some broader conspiracy theory about science, take a step back. Adopt a little humility. Imagine for a moment that the thousands of people who have collectively spent millions of hours in labs struggling to master complex subjects might actually know something that you don't. Then imagine a world in which we struggle to find the truth together through dialogue and real research rather than snarky, self-congratulatory memes.

How to Mislead with Spiffy-Looking Graphs, or The Importance of Good Education

I ran across this graph today on my FB feed:

Now, I cannot easily or quickly verify the source of this data or figure out who the "Andrew Barr" named here is. But let me take these numbers at face value for the purposes of argument.

The data appears to make a remarkable comparison. At first glance, it appears to show that measles as a public health problem had largely died out long before the vaccine was introduced in the United States. This observation, if true, would call into question the relationship between vaccination and the suppression of the measles disease - precisely what the poster of this graph wanted to do.

But notice what is actually being compared here. This is not a graph of measles cases. It's a graph of mortality, normed per 100,000 population. It's not a graph of how much measles there is in the US population, but rather a graph of how deadly the disease is in a proportional sense over time.

In that light, it's not at all surprising to see the decline. Advances in modern medicine have permitted us to render many things which used to be fatal now much less so. Today, people who contract measles are much less likely to die than in those who caught the disease 100 years ago. That's a great thing, and the decline in mortality does in fact have little to do with vaccination.

The rate of measles, on the other hand, is another story entirely. Here's a graph of the actual number of measles cases in the US, in thousands, from 1954 to 2008:

This graph is based on CDC data; I retrieved it here. If you want to argue that CDC data are falsified by some devious government conspiracy, then the conversation is over and you might as well go elsewhere. Otherwise, we can continue.

Note what this graph shows. In the latter half of the 1950's and the early 1960s, the number of measles cases did decline, but was still up over 400,000 cases per year. From 1964 to 1968, the years following the introduction of the vaccine, that number collapses, and with two brief blips over 50,000 in the 1970s never recovers again. Today the number of cases is negligible, essentially reduced to a statistical zero.

The argument that "the measles vaccine didn't do anything" falls apart the moment you show the second graph. Of course, folks who want desperately to believe that vaccination is bad won't show you this graph - they won't even find it themselves.

This is why education is so important. We need to teach our children how to read graphs, how to understand the difference between a graph of total numbers and one normed per 100,000 population, and how to question the data presented to them and the conclusions drawn therefrom. There are lots of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen out there with pretty graphs and thundering voices trying to get us to buy their wares. The defense against this is strong education, from elementary school all the way up to college. We don't have to fall for this kind nonsense, however pretty it is.

Where's the Truth? The Challenge of Scientific 'Controversies'

I wrote a little over a month ago about the use of the term "research" in public arguments over science. I argued at the time, and still maintain, that people often claim to have done "research" when what they really mean is that they have (very selectively) read other people's research. This is related, I think, to the erosion of respect for expertise, but that's a subject for another day.

At the time, a fairly robust Facebook discussion broke out among my friends about whether there isn't another reasonable form of the word "research" - what we might call "library research". Isn't it fair, some argued, for a layperson who is not expert in a given field to say that they are "researching" some issue by digging into the literature and reading what the experts have written? I will concede this point - though I would prefer the term "library research" to distinguish this from the sort of research that generates new knowledge, I think it's fair for non-experts to talk about "researching" a topic in the sense of informing themselves about the current state of what is known.

Of course, many of those who try to stir up "controversy" on scientific subjects (vaccines, climate change, etc.) aren't really doing this kind of "research" either. There's a difference between reading The Literature on a subject to try to find out what the experts think about something, and selectively reading that same research to bolster a predetermined conclusion that you've already arrived at (vaccines cause autism, climate change isn't real, the earth is 6000 years old - take your pick). Those people still aren't engaged in research, even of the "library research" variety, any more than a small child putting on his father's tie makes him an employed professional with a job. It's just window dressing, and usually pretty ill-fitting at that.

But in the midst of that Facebook conversation, one of my friends raised a very good question: if you are a non-expert faced with a controversial subject, how do you go about trying to research that topic to figure out, as best you can, what the truth is? This is actually harder than it might seem, in part because experts often don't do a very good job of communicating with the public and in part because those who are trying to create "controversy" as a way of arguing for extremely unorthodox (often demonstrably false) ideas like to muddy the water as much as they can. In the midst of that kind of free-for-all, what's a reasonable non-expert person to do?

There are a few fairly easy rules of thumb that will take you a little ways down the road. Just as the corollary to Godwin's Law states that whoever mentions Nazis first in an argument automatically loses, the adoption of any argument predicated on a vast conspiracy of silence on the part of thousands of otherwise-autonomous (if not competitive) individuals is a guaranteed loser. Efforts, therefore, to dismiss "climate science" as a cooked-up conspiracy fail on their face since such a theory would require the complicit cooperation of thousands of individual scientists around the world who all know better but have been convinced to lie to the rest of us. Ditto for arguments that the CDC  and NIH are somehow engaged in a conspiracy of silence - anybody who watches government agencies for any length of time knows that most of them leak like sieves and can't be trusted to keep much of anything secret. So if one side of a "debate" is relying on this kind of argument, it's safe to say they're probably wrong.

Beyond that, however, the waters get pretty muddy. Many folks involved in these controversies make claims to certain kinds of authority, while denying the authority claims of the other side. Take, for example, the work of Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has given a number of public talks recently claiming that modern chemical agriculture, and Monsanto's RoundUp product in particular, are going to make 1/2 of all American children develop Autism by the year 2025. This has been widely reported in a number of fringe science websites, often with headlines line this:

MIT States That Half of All Children May Be Autistic By 2025 Due to Monsanto

On the face of it, this is absurd. "MIT" states no such thing - in fact, the university itself does not endorse the work of any of its researchers. Moreover, Dr. Seneff is a highly controversial figure at best - an electrical engineer and expert in computational algorithms for understanding human language who has wandered into matters of public health, biochemistry, and epidemiology that are pretty far afield from her established expertise. Beyond presentations and talks, much of the work she has published in this area has been in the journal Entropy, itself a highly controversial publication whose parent organization, MDPI, has been accused of shady scientific practices. All of this gets into the realm of claim and counter-claim which can be VERY difficult for non-experts to sort through.

Folks that like to cite impressive institutions (MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins) on behalf of their claims are often quick to dismiss other equally-impressive institutions when scientists disagree with the argument they're trying to advance. This is another good indication that you may be dealing with a questionable argument - a persistent habit of attacking people rather than ideas (similar to the reliance on conspiracy theory, above). It's legitimate to question someone's credentials, because that's germane to whether they are a reliable source of information. Questioning motives, on the other hand, is generally out of bounds. Inconsistency doesn't look good either; note this article's introduction of its purported expert as a "Johns Hopkins University graduate" even though nearly every other graduate of that same institution engaged in research in the field of vaccines disagrees with him.

In the end, if you REALLY want to know what the state of knowledge is on a given subject, you first have to become conversant in the basics of the scientific method and you have to be willing to wade through an awful lot of material, some of which may be deliberately obfuscatory or misleading. That's a tall order for most folks, but if it matters to you to be right then that's what you have to do. This is one reason why scientific literacy is so important - more people need the tools to do this right. But equally important, people need the mental discipline to not "reason backwards", picking the answer they want based on their social tribe and then cherry-picking evidence to support it. That's probably the hardest barrier of all, and it's what separates actual scientists from wannabes with agendas.

When You're Losing, Change the Subject: Vaccines and the "Freedom" Agenda

I have blogged recently about the misuse of the term "research" by various movements seeking to argue with mainstream scientific consensus around a range of topics. People opposed to vaccines (led in particular by those who believe that vaccination causes autism and other maladies) have been in the news much lately, although the same arguments have been active around issues of climate change, evolutionary biology, and other issues. National Geographic recently published a cover story on this, provocatively titled (in the print version) "The War on Science".

The anti-vaccine movement has taken a lot of flak and pushback recently, both from the medical & public health community concerned that dropping rates of vaccination will undo progress from the last 100 years and from concerned parents afraid that the drop in herd immunity will expose their children to diseases long since removed from the population at large. It has been, from a social and political point of view, a fascinating and rare example of a loud minority being countered by a much larger majority. On a number of other issues vocal minorities hold sway simply because the larger population doesn't care enough. Apparently, public health is not one of those issues.

Given this pushback, it's unsurprising that the anti-vaccine movement is trying to change the terms of debate. Whenever somebody is losing an argument in the US, they try to turn it into an argument about Freedom, because Freedom is the one trump card that people think always wins the argument. This meme, now circulating on the internet, is emblematic of this approach:

I'm surprised that they didn't throw mom, the flag, and apple pie in there, but you get the picture. I mean, how can anybody possibly be against any of these wonderful things?

The organization sponsoring this particular argument, an outfit in California called Your Family, Your Choice, is trying to fight legislation that will take away the philosophical exemption to childhood vaccination currently allowed under California law. Many of the folks who oppose vaccination are indeed also opposed to science and research, at least as these things are understood by the medical research community. Such folks often want their own science, want to reach (or have already reached) their own conclusions, and are not kind (and often not very civil) to those who disagree with them.

But all of that is neither here nor there - what really interests me is the "I am pro-freedom" part of the argument. This is indeed the "go-to" for folks on the losing end of a public debate. Recently we've seen certain segments of our society opposed to gay marriage making the same claim on behalf of small businesses that don't want to serve gays - just as two generations ago, similar folks claimed "freedom" as a justification to turn away interracial couples. "Freedom" was the cry of George Wallace on the steps of the Alabama schoolhouse when he railed against "the oppression of the rights, privilege, and sovereignty" of his state in the face of integrationist pressure.

The fact is that we all give up a measure of freedom as the price of living in a civilized, advanced society. We agree not to drive through a red light. We agree to wear our seat belts - 49 out of 50 states in the US have some form of mandatory seat belt laws on the books. We agree to file certain kinds of information with the government at various levels. We agree to pay our taxes. We agree not to discriminate against fellow citizens when engaging in public commerce or service. Failure to do these things comes with the penalty of government sanction.

We suffer these infringements on our freedom because there are some collective goods that cannot be had otherwise. Because of our traffic laws - actually quite draconian by the standards of much of the world - we enjoy some of the safest highways and streets in the world, vastly safer than they were 80 or 100 years ago. Because of our attention to civil rights, populations once voiceless and enslaved are now freer and much better off and we are closer to realizing our ideals as a republic of equals.

Those who hold up the "pro-freedom" banner are trying to escape this reality. They want to free-ride on the rest of society, to deny that there are some things we can only have if we all contribute. Herd immunity from disease is one of those things, however much some folks may want to deny it.

So I find this latest adaptation by a political movement interesting, even entirely predictable. But I also suspect that it may be a last gasp of an effort that may soon collapse. The argument against vaccination is too weak, and the consequences too severe, for these folks to win. I have no doubt that we will see a great deal more shouting and gnashing of teeth in certain corners, and likely many more interesting internet memes. But as Richard Feynman reminded us a generation ago, for every successful technology "reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Vaccines, Climate Change, and the Misuse of "Research"

Because of the increase in measles cases across the United States, a lot has been written recently about vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement. I've avoided blogging on the subject, partly because the discussion has been a lot of heat and not very much light and partly because it's not so much a debate or a conversation as a minority of folks screaming at the top of their lungs while holding fingers in their ears lest they listen to anyone else. Frankly a lot of it is pretty ugly, so while I have taken some pains to make sure I read some "authentic" voices on the anti-vaccine side, on the whole it all just makes me sad.

I do think that the continual parade of claims and counter-claims, of facts and factoids and made-up nonsense, is counterproductive because it isn't an argument about science or what's true. The primary drivers, as they so often are, amount to tribalism - people protecting their self-identities. I read this piece the other day and was glad to find a medical professional who gets this. Click the link - it's well worth a read.

So what do I have to add to this conversation? I want to focus on the use - and more particularly the misuse - of one word, "research". I have seen this word misused in recent weeks by anti-vaccine parents, I have seen it misused in exactly the same way by climate change "skeptics" in recent years, and in similar fashion by partisans on any number of issues over time.

As an illustration, let me borrow words from an anti-vaccine parent posted to the internet (underlining added):

You want to vaccinate? Go for it. I choose not to. But shouldnt we all have the freedom to choose what's right for our family? My unvaccinated child is not putting your vaccinated (and therefore protected-right?) child at risk. In fact it's the opposite. Your vaccinated child sheds his/her vaccine for days putting my child, and others who cannot vaccinate due to medical reasons, at risk. But I'll assume that risk and hope his immune system is strong enough to protect him. You do your thing. I'll do mine. Just stop assuming I don't care about others, because I do. I care enough to watch Vaccine Nation to understand herd immunity and research vaccines for myself. I've read the package inserts from the manufacturer websites. Have you?

Now, to be clear - I do not doubt this person's sincerity or motives. I believe this author genuinely believe these words. The problem here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the term "research".

I see this claim a lot, not just from anti-vaccine folks but from climate change skeptics, gun-rights advocates, and many other partisans for various issues. They will claim to have "researched" something to come to their own conclusions - a subtle cultural argument that appeals to Americans' individualism. After all, who wouldn't want to come to their own conclusions instead of being one of the "sheeple" who follow the herd, right?

The problem is that what these people call "research" consists only of reading stuff that other people have written. The most generous thing that could be said is that they are engaged in literature review - reading the research of others in order to get a sense of what's already out there in the field. Lit reviews, as anybody trained in any academic or scientific field knows, are a necessary precursor to doing research. But they are not research itself.

Actual research involves:

• Formulating a falsifiable hypothesis
• Designing a legitimate and non-biased test for that hypothesis including valid and reliable operational measures for the key concepts
• Gathering original data to perform that test
• Analyzing the results
• Carefully drawing conclusions by comparing the data with the hypothesis
and then (the gold standard)
• Allowing the entire process to be author-blind reviewed by other established experts in the field who are qualified to judge the work.

The parent cited above, and all of this ilk, haven't done any of this. All they have done is read some other stuff that other people did, usually based on non-falsifiable hypotheses to begin with (for example, "the CDC is the center of a global conspiracy to cover up the truth.")

Moreover partisans on a given issue don't even do lit review right, because they only read or watch the stuff that already agrees with their point of view. They will occasionally cite a peer-reviewed article, often misreading its conclusions in the process (since they are rarely, themselves, actual experts in the field). They dismiss studies that draw different conclusions and evaluate studies with the grossest and most obvious of double standards. Watching a documentary film made by this man hardly qualifies as a thorough review of the relevant literature on any subject.

This, of course, is why actual expertise is worth something. People who are qualified to conduct actual research in a given field have to spend years learning how to do it right. Because of my education, I am qualified to do research on political phenomena. I am not qualified to do research on vaccines. And neither are nearly all of the anti-vaccine voices out there.

So the next time you run into someone spouting what appears to be a questionable point of view on a given subject and claiming to have "done their own research", call them on it. Ask what that "research" consists of. Ask what data they have collected, what testing and analysis methods they used, and what hypothesis they were testing. I expect the answers you get will be much more heat than light, because this isn't really about science. But at least people should admit that.

Sometimes, Power Resides Outside of Washington

I was struck by this article in last weeks' Chronicle of Higher Education:

Crusader for Better Science Teaching Finds Colleges Slow to Change

There are a lot of easy narratives to fit this into: status quo-defending professors vs. an upstart innovator, arguments about "outcomes-based" vs. "process-oriented" teaching, and so on. The debate about what's the best way for students to learn science is an important one, and I will leave it to those who are best suited to conduct it.

As usual, I'm drawn to the intersection between higher education and politics. The part of the article that struck me was this:

In 2010, while at British Columbia, he got a visit from another Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, U.S. energy secretary under Mr. Obama. Mr. Chu urged Mr. Wieman to join the White House science office. Mr. Chu suggested that Mr. Wieman could do a lot more to improve undergraduate science education from Washington than from Vancouver, Mr. Wieman says. (emphasis added)

This is a typical notion - that if you want to really get something done, you need to go where the "action" is, the center of power: Washington. Steven Chu's suggestion to Wieman was, in terms of conventional wisdom, entirely unremarkable.

The rest of the article goes on to talk about some of the mechanisms that have prevented Wieman's ideas and research on science pedagogy from gaining widespread traction once he took Chu up on his offer. Many would tell that story to say, despite his position as a science advisor to the White House. I want to suggest that the failure of Wieman's ideas to be adopted more widely and quickly is because of that position.

Over the past 60 years (some might argue for the past 100), we have seen an increasing centralization of power and authority, both in the Federal government in general and in the executive branch in particular. There are certainly instances in which this was a good thing; the Civil Rights Movement would have struggled for far longer if not for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which overrode the express wishes of a number of states (largely in the South), and for the willingness of the Federal Executive to intervene with military force to protect school integration in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama.

But that centralization has its downsides. In every debate in which the Federal government decides to tip the scales, there are winners and losers. Since every issue creates different cleavages, the chances of being on the losing end of the stick approach near-certainty over time. Eventually, everyone has been ticked off by the government at some point - a phenomenon long ago uncovered by John Mueller, among others.

The past two administrations (Bush and Obama) have exacerbated this phenomena. Each administration was deeply and abidingly disappointing to partisans of the other party, with the further ordered impact that many liberals ticked off by Bush have not been restored to full faith in the government by Obama (the recent revelations about NSA spying being a case in point).

In this context, the phrase "I'm from the government, I'm here to help" has become more ironic and maligned than ever. It is difficult to find folks these days who have faith in both the motives and the capacity of government to do good things - but much easier to find instances in which people fear government intrusion into areas it may not belong.

This is especially true when it comes to fields of expertise. In the case of the article above, science faculty are supposed to be experts in how to teach science to college students (whether they actually are experts or not is another question). Nobody who fancies himself an expert in something likes outsiders telling him what to do - especially when that outsider is wearing the badge of the Federal government, and therefore the implicit threat of funding withheld.

There are other things contributing to the reluctance to change, of course - fear of change itself, fear of MOOCs and online learning, fear that universities are being undermined by market forces, fear of anti-intellectualism, and so on. But the fact remains that in the current climate, anybody trying to induce widespread change may be better off doing so from outside the government than from within it.

How could such change come about? If the object is to get people (in this case, tenured faculty) to change their habits and try something new, the answer has to be through persuasion. You cannot force these folks to teach differently, you have to persuade them that it's a good idea. And persuasion is inherently a relational tool that comes only through conversation. That conversation is much more effective in an environment where there are no threats, even implicit ones, in the air.

In this sense, it's possible that Wiemer may well have effected more change had he stayed anchored in Vancouver. From that position, armed with his research, he would have been harmless - and therefore may have had an easier time engaging in the necessary conversations. Give some TED talks; hold symposia; travel from university to university spreading ideas and debating skeptics. That takes resources, it's true - but relatively modest ones, easily procured by a Nobel Prize winner.

As long as we accept the logic that "if you want anything done, you have to go through Washington," a great deal less will get done that could be otherwise. In this day and age, change may not always require power - in fact, power may inhibit change. Let's instead fashion our own power and change our own world, rather than waiting for Washington's broken system to do it for us.

Thoughts on Rep. Akin's "Foot in Mouth Disease" Problem

I'm usually smart enough to stay away from really nasty political issues. I guess today isn't one of my smarter days.

Actually, in thinking about Rep. Akin and the flap-du-jour stemming from his comments on abortion, I'm not really interested in the debate about abortion policy. Akin and his supporters may want to eliminate access to abortion in cases of rape, but they are in the minority in this country and will always continue to be. That's not a fight they're ever going to win. Beyond that, I'll let others carry on the fight.

What I found most disturbing (this will really label me as a pointy-headed intellectual) is not the policy debate, but the epistemology underlying what he said. For those who have been hiding in a cave, here's the core of his remarks that have drawn the most fire:

"It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare,” Akin said, referring to conception following a rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." (from the LA Times)

Efforts to identify the "doctors" Akin refers to have apparently come to naught. Yesterday another news outlet ran a piece on the history of this line - that there's some kind of biological defense that keeps rape victims from getting pregnant. This is a claim that's been made before, repeatedly - always (no coincidence here) by politicians with a particular stance on the abortion policy debate.

The epistemological problem, of course, is that this is crap. There's not a shred of evidence - not statistical, not biological, not medical, nothing - to support this contention. It is, quite simply, made up. It is sustained and passed from person to person within parts of the anti-abortion community via the mechanism of Wishful Thinking. It's a "fact" that certain people want to believe, and so they believe it, completely sans evidence.

As various folks, including Bernard Baruch and James Schlesinger, have pointed out - everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. Richard Feynman famously noted after the Challenger disaster that "for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." It is reality, not the "spin" we put on it, that determines life and death.

People are welcome to make whatever moral arguments they like about abortion - which is a morally challenging arena, open to legitimate debate over hard issues. What nobody is allowed to do - at least, not in a society based on reason, discourse, and laws - is make up "facts" to try to bolster their moral position.

Anybody who does so is not merely guilty of being "wrong" on an issue. Akin, and those who have come before him, is either a charlatan (a fancy term for "liar") or a fool. He is either willing to invent things to suit his own purposes, or he is willing to believe things other people say without regard for whether they might be true or not. Either condition should exclude him from public office.

There are folks who will disagree, of course, and if he stays in the race some people in Missouri will vote for him. These are folks who think he's right on the moral issue, or on something else, and don't care about Akin's grasp of facts. And that is one of the real divides in American politics.

There are plenty of people in both political parties who think this way - who are so Tribal in their identities that (as Fritz Heider pointed out) they will bend reality around them to fit their feelings. There are also plenty of people in both parties who really do care about reality and facts, and who try hard to seek evidence, think rationally, and change their minds when the facts demand it.

To my mind, that's a far more important distinction than party ID. Two people from opposite parties who agree on epistemology and process can come to agreement, or at least narrow the scope of disagreement, by pursuing the facts together. But two people who have completely different, unverifiable sets of facts will never agree on anything. They can live separately, or agree to an uneasy coexistence, or they can try to eliminate each other. But living in community together is probably not going to be possible.

I'll be interested to see whether Akin drops out or not - as of this writing, he has not. The battle among Republicans over his candidacy is, at least partly, over this very issue. It will be interesting to see who wins.

Science, Public Opinion, and the Never-Ending Battle

Much is being made of the latest law in Tennessee aimed at opening space in science classrooms in that state for "alternative theories" on evolution and global warming. The fact that organized forces behind these two issues - which otherwise have nothing to do with each other - have joined together in this case tells us what we already know: that this is about politics, not science.

In point of fact, it's always about politics first. That is the nature of things. Because we have, at root, two fundamental systems in play here. The first is the system of science, which at its heart is not about this theory or that but about a basic set of rules - evidence, hypothesis testing, replicability, peer review. Evolutionary biology is the result of the scientific method. In this sense, a law which allows teachers to consider alternative evidence and hypotheses is, on its face, not anti-scientific - which, I'm sure, is why it was written that way.

The problem comes in the context of school classrooms, because schoolchildren are at an inherent disadvantage. There is no peer review in school, because the teacher is an authority figure and the students in little position to argue. Classrooms, especially in elementary and middle schools (but to a substantial degree in high schools as well) are not about doing science (following the scientific method), but about teaching the results of science - that is, what other scientists using the scientific method have found. This is what "state standards" are about, because standardized tests do not (and cannot) get at whether a child has learned to think like a scientist - only whether he or she has learned a body of material already gathered by other scientists using that method.

So this latest round of the debate in Tennessee is really about muddying the issue. By trying to pretend that sixth or eighth graders are scientists (not consumers of the results of science), folks with particular agendas (political, theological, or otherwise) hope to use the confusion to win what they cannot otherwise.

And this is where the system of science (the development of knowledge) and science education (the transmission of that knowledge) run headlong into another system: democracy. Our system of public education is founded on democracy - indeed, as Mark Twain put it, "public education is democracy".

But that has meant, historically, giving the local community substantial control over the curriculum. The alternative - to put control over the curriculum into national hands - is to centralize power, the results of which depend very much on who wields that power. It is anti-democratic, and contrary to the founding principles of the Constitution.

So we praise the democratic system that allows local communities substantial control over what their children are taught. But what then if the majority of some local community wish their children to be taught strict creationism, or that the world is flat, or the political dogma of this or that political party? If the community as a whole feels strongly enough about it, that is what will be. Will the children in question suffer? That depends very much on your point of view - for some, ideological purity will seem more important that openness of mind and an ability to move from the reception of scientific knowledge to the creation of new knowledge.

Historically, democracy itself has provided the mechanism for balance. A few years ago, proponents of creationism briefly won control of the Kansas Board of Education - only to get swept out of office in subsequent elections. The same happened in Dover, PA, after a highly-publicized court case. It seems that, when push comes to shove at the ballot box, a majority of Americans even in otherwise-conservative areas prefer to let science run its course than to overrule it with ideology. So it may well be in Tennessee. And if not - if Tennessee becomes the anti-science state - there are 49 other states that will be more than happy to take up the slack.